Czytaj książkę: «The Sunflower Forest»
Torey Hayden
The Sunflower Forest
A novel
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
In that year what I wanted most was a boyfriend. I was seventeen and had never had a date. I had the rest: breasts, hair under my arms, my period, the desire. I certainly had the desire.
Once, when I was little and not too informed about the mechanics, my best friend and I had pretended to make love, our legs spread apart scissor-fashion, until we were crotch to crotch, one person’s sneaker under the other person’s nose. My grandmother had caught us at it. She sent Cecily home and spanked me with a wooden mixing spoon and made me sit in the pantry to say Hail Marys. There was no doubt in her mind, she said: I got such interests from my mother. Perhaps I did. However, even at that tender age, I had decided that they weren’t such bad interests to have.
Nonetheless, I had reached seventeen with nothing more than a valentine from Wayne Carmelee and three kisses stolen by a Danish Eagle Scout under the bleachers at the county fair in Sandpoint, Idaho.
This was a source of great personal dismay to me and not helped at all by my sister Megan, who was nine that year and always willing to confirm for me that I was just as ugly as I assumed I must be. She also suggested that I probably smelled bad to boys.
My father told me that all I needed was patience. It was a natural thing, and you couldn’t stop nature from catching up with you. My time would come, he said. I replied that if we hadn’t moved around as much as we had, perhaps nature would have already located me.
So, in the end, it was Mama I went to for comfort. I asked her when she first fell in love.
‘Hans Klaus Fischer,’ she said to me. She was scrubbing the floor in the kitchen when I found her. Down on her hands and knees on the linoleum, her hair tied up in a red bandanna, she paused and considered the question. And grinned. Reaching up on the kitchen counter for her cigarettes, she sat down again on the floor and leaned back against the counter next to the sink. She crossed her legs and balanced the ashtray on one knee. ‘That was when I was living in Dresden with Tante Elfie. You see, I wasn’t supposed to be seeing boys. I was just turned fifteen and Tante said I couldn’t go out yet. They were very strict in those days, you understand.’ She lit the cigarette and over the top of it, her eyes were smiling. We both knew that what Tante Elfie said probably never had much effect on what my mother did.
‘He was the baker’s son. I met him because Tante Elfie made me go after the bread every day. If she’d sent Birgitta, who knows? Perhaps I would never have met him. But Birgitta was the lazy one.
‘Anyhow, he was at the back of the shop each day, taking down the loaves.’ She paused and her eyes were still on me. ‘And do you think he was handsome?’
‘Was he, Mama?’ I asked. You always prompted Mama with her stories. That was half the fun.
‘Was he handsome? Well, I will tell you. His hair was maybe the colour of yours. A little darker, perhaps, and combed down like this. That’s the way the boys wore their hair in those days. His eyes were blue, well, maybe more a blue-green. And light. A light, light blue-green. Like the colour old glass is sometimes. And he had very fine lips. Thin. Normally, I don’t like thin lips on a man, but with Hans Klaus Fischer, they gave him such a very …what can I say? …important expression. Haughty, that’s the word for it. He would stand in the back room and take down the loaves, and I would think, “Mara, you must have that boy for your boyfriend.” You could tell how important he was just by looking at him.’
She grinned at me. ‘I was very much in love with him. I went every day for the bread, and while I waited, all I could think of was kissing those fine, important-looking lips.’
‘And did you?’
‘Well, in the beginning it was very hard to get him to notice me. I was just one girl, and there were many girls in love with Hans Klaus Fischer.’
‘But you did get him to fall in love with you, didn’t you?’ I asked.
She was still grinning. With one hand she stuck long strands of hair back up under her bandanna, and she said nothing. Mama didn’t have to. She just grinned.
‘What did you do? How did you get him to notice you when there were all those other girls?’
‘I began to come in wearing my Bund deutscher Mädchen uniform. Every day. Even when there wasn’t a meeting. You see, he was a group leader with the Youth Movement.’ She paused, reflecting, and studied the end of her cigarette. The smile came back to her lips. ‘Sometimes I would see him in the back of the shop, and he would have his uniform on. He was very handsome in that uniform. He had a sort of strut in his walk when he wore his uniform; I could tell he thought it made him somebody. So, I thought to myself, Mara, he’s going to like you if he thinks you’re a good member of the BdM.’
‘And did he?’
She winked at me.
‘What did Tante Elfie say then? Did she mind that you were seeing a boy when you weren’t supposed to?’
‘Well, she did a little. At first she did. But I told her what a fine family Hans Klaus came from. I told her what a good boy he was. He was very clever at his studies, you see, and I heard his father tell Frau Schwartz once in the bakers that Hans Klaus might be chosen for the Adolf Hitler School. It was almost a sure thing, he said. So when Tante knew that, she said I could go dancing with him on Friday nights. If Birgitta went along. You know.’ She laughed. ‘To make sure I never really found out much about kissing those fine lips. They were very strict in those days. Not like now.’
‘But how did you make him love you, that’s what I want to know. How did you get him to ask you out for a date in the first place?’
Holding the cigarette out, Mama gazed at it before finally snuffing it out in the ashtray. The floor all around us was still wet, and we sat together, barricaded behind scrub brushes, the pail and floor rags, our backs against the kitchen cupboard.
‘I did a rather naughty thing,’ Mama said. Her voice was low and conspiratorial.
‘What was that?’
‘Well, when he came to the front of the shop once to talk to me, I told him I was really the granddaughter of the Archduke.’
I laughed. ‘You did?’
‘I told him my grandfather was the Archduke and that I had been sent to Dresden for my safety. To live with Tante Elfie, who wasn’t really my auntie at all but just a nanny my family paid to take care of me.’
That struck me as amusing, just the sort of thing I could picture Mama doing with such melodramatic realism that poor Hans Klaus Fischer no doubt never knew what hit him.
‘Why on earth did you do that?’ I asked.
Giving a shrug, she giggled. ‘I don’t know. It was just something I did. I wanted to make sure he liked me. I was afraid he wouldn’t.’
‘But it was a lie, Mama,’ I said, still tickled with the mental image of it.
Another shrug and she pursed her lips in a pensive expression. ‘No. Not really. Just a story. I didn’t mean it to hurt. There just weren’t enough interesting true things to tell him.’
‘So, you told him the Archduke was your grandfather?’
‘Well, you see, you must understand, I was quite desperate about him. I just wanted things to be nice. I thought if he believed that, then he would certainly want to go dancing with me. And once he knew me, then it wouldn’t matter any more who I was related to.’ She looked over at me, and the joke of it sparkled in her eyes. ‘You must understand, I was only fifteen. Everyone’s a little mad when they’re fifteen, believe me.’
‘Did he ever find out the truth?’
She shrugged and rose up on her knees to finish the rest of the floor. ‘I don’t know. After I went to Jena, I never saw him again.’
I was dreaming. It was about the house on Stuart Avenue where we had lived before Megan was born. I was upstairs in the small attic room that my father had made into a bedroom for me. I was standing in front of the little window, looking down on the street below. But instead of the elms that had lined either side of Stuart Avenue, there were sunflowers. The avenue was empty but the sun was shining and it was very beautiful.
However, even though it seemed like the house on Stuart Avenue, I knew it actually wasn’t. It was the apartment in Detroit where we had lived for a while when I was very young. While the bedroom upstairs belonged to Stuart Avenue, I knew that the stairway would lead down into the apartment in Detroit.
In the dream I could hear Mama crying. She was sitting on a cardboard box in the gloomy little storage area under the stairs. But I was still upstairs in the house on Stuart Avenue.
‘Lesley, are you ever going to get up?’
I jerked awake.
Megan was standing in the doorway of my bedroom. She had nothing on but her underpants and an oversized T-shirt that said ‘NASA Johnson Space Center/Houston’ across the front. Leaning against the door frame, she braced one foot against the shin of her other leg. ‘Daddy says you have to get up right now, Lesley. He has to go to work for a while this morning and he says you got to come down and stay with Mama while he’s gone.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Almost nine o’clock. Daddy says he’ll be back after lunch.’
She turned and left without shutting the door behind her.
I closed my eyes. I could still remember the dream. I had awakened so abruptly that it clung to me and seemed very real, even as it faded.
By the time I’d dressed and come down to the kitchen, my father had already left. Megan was there, still eating breakfast. She had her chair pushed back from the table, her legs drawn up under the generous folds of the NASA T-shirt. Mama was clearing away the breakfast dishes and putting them into the sink. The radio was playing very loudly. Saturday Morning Swap Shop. My mother was addicted to the show, relishing all the bargains she dreamed of getting.
I reached over and took a slice of bread to put into the toaster. It was a wholemeal type, full of crunchy little wheat berries. Although it made wonderful toast, it was messy to eat because all the wheat berries tumbled everywhere. And Megan, who already had a piece, wasn’t helping things. She was picking wheat berries out and carefully setting them atop her knees, which, pulled up under the T-shirt, formed a knobby platform. Then she licked the wheat berries off with the tip of her tongue. Each one, one by one.
‘Honestly, Megan, you eat like a pig,’ I said.
Megan set another wheat berry out, looked over to make certain I was watching and then languidly pulled it up with the tip of her tongue.
‘Mama, look at her. Look at the disgusting mess Megan is making with her toast.’
My mother turned from the sink. She regarded Megan a moment and shook her head. ‘You’re making crumbs everywhere,’ she said. ‘Sit up and put your feet down where they belong.’
I went to the cupboard for Rice Krispies.
‘Megan, Mama said put your feet down,’ I said when I returned to the table with my bowl of cereal.
‘So? You’re not my mother.’
‘Well, she is. So, do it, Megan. Mama said to.’
‘So, make me.’
Annoyed, I sat down.
When Megan continued to pick at her toast, I reached over and grabbed one of her legs. I yanked it down to the floor.
Mama ignored us. She kept her back to us and continued to do the dishes. She had a Brillo pad in one hand and the old cast-iron skillet in the other and was really giving it hell. Occasionally, she would pause and put to her lips the cigarette that was burning in the ashtray on the windowsill. Once she turned the radio higher. But she never turned around.
When Megan reached for another piece of toast, I clamped my hand over her wrist.
‘Stop it!’ Megan said, rather louder than necessary. ‘Stop bossing me around all the time, Lesley.’
‘The way you’re eating that toast is nauseating and you know it. Now, you can’t have another slice. You’re making a mess on purpose.’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘Mama? Make Megan stop. She’s still picking at her bread. She didn’t listen to you at all the first time.’
‘Lesley, let go of me. Let go of my arm! I mean it.’ Megan leaped to her feet to yank her arm free. The motion knocked her chair over backwards with a resounding bang.
Mama turned around.
Silence.
We both looked at her. She picked up her cigarette and snuffed it out in the ashtray with great care. The room went so quiet that I thought I could hear the sound of the cigarette against the glass of the ashtray, in spite of the clamour of Saturday Morning Swap Shop.
Wearily, Mama raised a hand to run through the hair alongside her face. ‘What is the matter with you two? You’re sisters. How can you always argue?’
We didn’t answer. There was no point in answering.
‘I can’t understand you,’ Mama said. ‘Why aren’t you happy? You have such good lives. O’Malley and I, we love you. We give you everything. And still you aren’t happy.’
‘We’re happy,’ Megan said.
‘We were just horsing around, Mama,’ I said. ‘We didn’t mean to sound like we were arguing. Did we, Megs? We were just playing.’
‘I cannot understand you.’
‘We are happy, Mama,’ Megan said again and there was soft desperation in her voice. ‘See? See? I’m smiling. I’m happy. Me and Lesley, we’re real happy. Don’t cry, OK?’
But it was too late. Mama lowered her face into her hands. Then she ran from the kitchen. We remained, listening to the shuffling unevenness of her footsteps on the stairs until they were drowned out by the radio.
Megan also began to cry. The tipped-over chair was still on the floor behind her. She stood, watching me, and let the tears run down over her cheeks.
‘Look, Megs, you want some more breakfast? Some toaster waffles maybe? You like them, Meggie. Don’t cry, all right? Shall I fix you some waffles? They’re your favourites.’
Wiping her eyes, she shook her head. Then she righted the chair and left the kitchen too.
My dad called them ‘spells’. Mama’s spells. When they happened, he would lift his shoulders in a bemused, half-shrug and then smile, as if it were just a whimsical little quirk she had, such as the way people might throw salt over their shoulder after spilling it. Although I’d hated the episodes, for most of my childhood I thought they were normal. I thought every child’s mother acted like that. I must have been ten or eleven before I discovered other mothers didn’t.
I stayed in the kitchen alone and finished up the few dishes left in the sink. Clearing off the table, I wiped away the last crumbs of Megan’s toast. I dumped the soggy Rice Krispies.
Sometime later Megan came back into the kitchen. With a widetoothed comb, she was trying to untangle the ends of her hair. ‘Will you help me?’ she asked, holding out the comb. ‘I can’t get all the snarls out.’
My sister had beautiful hair. Like my father’s, it was so dark that it was almost black, but like Mama’s, it was very, very straight. You could run your fingers through it and it would fall away in a soft, undulating manner, like water. The best part about Megan’s hair, however, was the length. It was nearly long enough for her to sit on. There was so much of it and it was so often left loose, since the sheer weight of it prevented her from using little-girls’ hairslides or headbands, that Megan always had a kind of untamed look about her. Even so, people stopped sometimes and turned around to look at her again because she was so striking. I had never been allowed to keep my hair that long when I was Megan’s age, but then I had never had hair like Megan’s.
‘You know, Les, Daddy’s going to kill you for giving Mama a spell,’ Megan said softly as I combed her hair.
‘Me? It was your fault, you little pig. Daddy’s going to kill us both.’
She didn’t answer. Pulling away from me, she took the comb out of my hand and went over to the table. She hoisted herself up on it and then pulled long strands of hair around to comb the tangles from the ends.
‘Megan, don’t do that on the table.’
She didn’t respond.
‘Did you hear me? That’s unsanitary. Go somewhere else.’
Still no response. But she had stopped combing her hair. Instead, she just fingered through it, regarding the strands. ‘Les?’ she asked without looking up. ‘Why do you suppose Mama does that?’
‘Does what?’
‘You know. That. I mean, we were just goofing around, that’s all. How come she can never tell that?’
I shrugged.
‘Why does she keep thinking we’re unhappy? How come it’s so important to her anyway that we be happy a hundred per cent of every second?’
‘It’s just one of those things, Megs.’
‘One of what things?’
I shrugged.
At a quarter to eleven Mama came downstairs again. Megan and I were still sitting in the kitchen. She came to the table and reached for her cigarettes.
‘Do you want a cup of coffee?’ I asked. I was already on my feet.
She nodded. Going over to the sink, she leaned forward to look out the window above it. With fingers of one hand resting against her lips, she smoked without ever taking the cigarette from her mouth.
‘There are no flowers,’ she said.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘But there’ll be plenty again when spring comes. Remember all the new ones Daddy planted?’
Megan had wrested the kettle from me so that she could fix Mama’s coffee herself. Carefully, she measured a spoonful of granules from the jar. ‘Here, Mama,’ she said, stirring the boiling water in. ‘Here’s your coffee.’ She squeezed her body between my mother and the sink in an effort to make Mama look down at her. She held up the mug of steaming liquid. ‘Here, Mama. Just the way you like it.’ But my mother stared over her to the window.
They didn’t look much alike, my sister and my mother. Megan was thin and lithe and dark, like some half-imagined thing escaped from the pages of a fairy tale. Mama was tall and pale, with broad, prominent features. Her hair was still light as sea sand. The only thing she had given Megan was her blue eyes, and they were very blue, like chambray cloth.
Mama turned entirely away from the window, and Megan had to run around to be in front of her again.
‘I’m sick of this place,’ Mama said. ‘It’s too cold. I hate the cold.’
Mama went over to the table and sat down. With both hands she finally accepted Megan’s mug of coffee.
‘Does that mean we’re going to move again?’ Megan asked very quietly.
‘I don’t like it here,’ Mama replied.
‘I do,’ Megan said, her voice still soft and tentative. Mama was looking at her over the top of her mug as she drank the coffee. ‘I think it’s nice here, Mama. I got friends here. Like Katie and Tracey Pickett.’
My mother lowered the cup. ‘There are no flowers.’
‘But Mama, it’s January.’
With a sigh my mother set the coffee mug on the table. She gazed at it. ‘But there are no flowers here.’
‘There aren’t any flowers anywhere in January, Mama,’ Megan said.
My mother was silent for a moment. ‘There were in Lébény. In Popi’s conservatory,’ she said. ‘There were always flowers there.’
Megan’s face brightened abruptly. Coming closer to Mama, she knelt down and put her arms around Mama’s neck. With one hand she moved Mama’s face away from the direction of the coffee mug so that she would have to look at her. ‘Tell me and Lessie about Lébény, OK, Mama? About Popi’s flowers, OK? Tell us about that time you and Elek sneaked in and took Popi’s camellias for your hair and then you two went to that dance. You know. That time you weren’t supposed to be up late because it was a big-people’s party. The time they played “The Blue Danube” and you and Elek danced in the upstairs hallway and you could smell all the beautiful ladies’ perfume. Tell us that story, OK?’
My mother’s face softened. The tired, bloodless look left her and she smiled down at Megan, who was on her knees beside the chair. ‘You know that story, Liebes. I have told you that story a hundred times already.’
‘Oh, I know,’ Megan said, her expression beguiling. ‘But it’s really my super favourite. Tell me again, OK? Please? Me and Lessie want to hear it.’
Mama was still smiling when she touched Megan’s face. The smile made my mother very beautiful.
Chapter Two
My mother was born into a family of the Hungarian gentry, genteelly declining in the ruins of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father, who had fought alongside von Hindenburg in the Great War, had retired from the military a short time afterwards and returned to manage his family estate in northwestern Hungary. His child bride, whom he’d met and married in 1914, was the youngest daughter of one of the old, established families in Meissen, in Saxonia.
Besides my mother, there had been three other children in her family. Her older brother, Mihály, she remembered only dimly because he had gone far away for schooling in Germany before she was two. Her beloved younger brother, Elek, however, was only thirteen months her junior, and they had been constant childhood companions. Mama’s stories about Elek were so vivid he almost seemed to be my brother. Her younger sister, Johanna, had died of scarlet fever the year Mama was eight.
Although my mother never said as much, I suspect she had been her father’s favourite among the four children. She had been a strikingly beautiful child, with that blonde, clear-eyed pureness that was so prized in those days in that part of Europe. In all the photographs, she was dressed up like a little princess, in velvets and silks and lace. Her flaxen hair was very long and carefully curled. And even with the solemn mood of those old pictures, she’d managed just the slightest hint of a smile on her lips. We had only one photograph of her entire family together, and in it, my mother stood apart from the other children and leaned against Popi’s arm. If you looked carefully, you could see his hand on her shoulder, his fingers twisted lovingly through her hair.
Popi had seen to it that she was well turned out. She had been bilingual all her life because Mutti spoke to her only in German, while Popi spoke Hungarian. But he had also brought a special tutor from Milan for her when she was six so that she could learn Italian. She had had dancing lessons and voice lessons and had learned to play the piano and the organ. When she’d wanted a pony, Popi had hired a riding instructor from Vienna and bought her a white horse.
Like her older brother, Mihály, my mother had been a gifted student. As always, Popi was determined to give her the best advantages. Both he and Mutti believed in the superiority of a German education, so when my mother was twelve, she went to live with Mutti’s sister, Tante Elfie, in Dresden. There she attended a private girls’ school and prepared for university.
My mother had hated leaving home. For a solid year, she said, she was homesick, crying herself to sleep so many nights that Tante Elfie finally moved her bed into the hallway so that she wouldn’t disturb Birgitta, Tante Elfie’s daughter, with whom Mama was sharing a room. On this occasion Popi didn’t give in to her pleas, and she stayed in Dresden. Slowly, she grew accustomed to life in the city, to Tante Elfie, who insisted on always setting her table with a lace tablecloth, and to Birgitta, who snored.
The war broke out during my mother’s first year at the university in Jena. She was sixteen and able to continue her studies into the autumn of that year before the turmoil disrupted university life. She would have been sent back to Hungary, she told us, because Hitler was deporting everyone with foreign birth certificates, but she was recognized as an ethnic German, a Volksdeutscherin, and allowed to stay. Soon afterward, she went to a youth hostel in northern Germany with several other girls who had been members of the Bund deutscher Mädchen.
Mama didn’t have a lot of stories about those years. I think she was desperately frightened for much of the time. The hostel wasn’t far from Hamburg, and my mother often spoke of hiding in a cupboard to muffle the sounds of the Allied planes flying over. What we did hear about, when she told stories, was the countryside, broad, flat, humid in summer, frigid in winter. And we heard sometimes about other girls and women whom she met during the war. Part of the time she worked on a farm, and she met one of her best characters during those experiences. Jadwiga was a Polish matron from Warsaw. I was never exactly clear how Jadwiga came to be on the farm, and from the way Mama told it, Jadwiga always sounded slightly surprised by the circumstances herself. What amused Mama was that it seemed to bother Jadwiga not so much that she was a city housewife out doing farmwork but rather that she was forced into intimacy with such socially inferior individuals as she thought all the other women to be. Mama, who had a wicked gift for mimicking people, would give us the whole show, imitating Jadwiga down to her walk, her buck teeth and her nasal accent. Mama would sashay around and around the room, snorting at us in mock Polish, contorting her face into a rabbity look of disdain until she broke up, laughing so hard that she was forced to stop. Then she’d drop into a chair, clutching her stomach, overcome with hilarity. Inevitably, Megan and I would laugh until we had tears running down our faces.
By 1945, when the British soldiers came with chocolate and cigarettes, my mother had typhus and was so sick she had no memory of them. She did recall the chocolate bars, however, and in her drawer in the bedroom, she still kept the wrapper from the first one she was given after the war.
It was then, while lying in the hospital recovering, that my mother had met my father. He was an American GI who had come to visit someone else in the ward. Mama was in bed, still weak from typhus, half bald from malnutrition and with her arm bandaged from wrist to elbow because of a septic cut. As my dad was walking down the aisle between the rows of beds, Mama, who was trying to eat soup with the wrong hand, dropped not only her spoon but the tray and bowl as well. Soup went everywhere. My father bent down to retrieve the rolling soup bowl. When he stood up and gave it back to her, that was it, he said. He loved her instantly, bandage, bald head, soup and all. Whether that’s precisely how it happened, it’s hard to say. My father always has been a romantic.
They married in Vienna on New Year’s Day, 1946. My mother’s one wish as she grew stronger had been to return to Hungary and locate her family. She’d lost contact with all of them during the course of the war. Throughout the winter of 1945–6, she and my father searched through the war-ravaged countryside of Germany, Austria, western Czechoslovakia and northwestern Hungary.
None of my mother’s immediate family had survived the war. Her brother Mihály, who already had a wife and child by the time the war broke out, was conscripted into the Wehrmacht in 1936. He was killed during manoeuvres in France. Mutti died of heart failure in 1940. Elek, who had remained at home to help his father run the estate rather than joining the military the way most boys his age had done, was shot by German soldiers in 1942. Popi, distraught and alone, had gone up to Tante Elfie’s in Dresden to search for information about my mother. He and Tante Elfie were killed in the 1945 Allied bombings. My mother never located Birgitta.
In September 1946 my father was posted to an army base in southern England. After discharge the following spring, he and my mother had remained in Great Britain, eventually moving to Wales. Most of the following ten years were spent living in a cottage on a Welsh mountainside. Mama told Megan and me beautifully elaborate stories about that period of their lives. The cottage where they lived had been derelict, and the farmer Dad worked for had told them they could live in it rent free, if they wanted to fix it up. He’d felt sorry for Mama, who was still in poor health, and he said the mountain air would help speed her recovery. The cottage was way up in the hills without even a road to it. They had to walk up a steep trail through a forest and over a footbridge to get there. Chiselled in slate above the door was the name of the cottage in Welsh. It meant Forest of Flowers. Mama said when they came the whole back garden of the cottage was overgrown with sunflowers. Mama took that to be a good omen, since sunflowers didn’t normally do well in Wales because of the rain. But at Forest of Flowers they thrived. My parents lived there until the late fifties. Then there was a cold winter, followed by a wet summer, and the sunflowers didn’t bloom. Mama and Daddy moved.
I waited until my father had finished his supper that Saturday evening and had gone up to his study. At night after a meal he liked to go there to sit among his things and listen to the radio. Occasionally he would read or write letters, but usually he did nothing more than push back the lounger, put the music station on and listen.
‘Dad?’ I said, opening the door slightly. ‘May I talk to you?’
He had the lounger fully reclined and his eyes were closed. He opened them. ‘Yes, of course, Lessie, come in.’
I shut the door carefully behind me and came over to sit on the footstool beside the chair. I touched the arm of the lounger with one finger to feel the rough, knobby threads in the upholstery.
‘Are we going to move, Dad?’
He had his eyes closed again. The radio was playing quite loudly. It was classical music. In all honesty I don’t believe my father knew up from down about such music. My mother did. She knew the titles, who composed what when, which type of music it was and who the performing artist was. But Dad neither knew nor particularly cared. He liked to listen because that was the only radio station with almost no commercials.
He didn’t answer my question.
‘I hear Mama beginning to talk,’ I said. ‘She’s thinking about it.’
‘She hasn’t said anything to me.’
‘No. She hasn’t said anything to me either. But I can hear it nonetheless.’
He didn’t stir.
‘So? Are we?’ I asked.
‘Your mama needs a warmer climate, Lessie,’ he said at last and opened his eyes again. ‘It’s too cold for her here.’
‘We’ve been to warmer climates before, Dad, and she didn’t like any of them either. Face it. She doesn’t really like it anywhere.’
I could see the pupils of his eyes dilate. They grew larger for a moment and then shrank back.
‘Your mama hasn’t said a thing to me,’ he said. ‘So don’t go thinking up problems you haven’t got.’
I felt the upholstery again with my finger.
‘And another thing. I don’t like to hear you talk like that. The cold bothers her. You know that. It aggravates her back. So it’s through no fault of her own.’
‘She’s got pills for her back, Dad.’
He was still watching me. ‘Well, there’s no need for her to suffer with the cold when there are plenty of warmer places.’
‘It’s not the cold,’ I replied. ‘It’s the flowers.’
He pushed the lounger up into a sitting position. ‘What?’
‘I said, it’s the flowers. It’s not the cold or her back or anything else. It’s the stupid flowers. She wants to be somewhere with flowers. Even in January.’
My father didn’t say anything. It grew noticeably quiet, even with the music playing.
I studied him. My father couldn’t exactly be called a handsome man. He was of Irish descent, short and wiry, with masses of curly black hair, greying by his ears. His face had a well-lived-in look, especially around the eyes, as if he’d had a lifetime of bad nights’ sleep. But it was a cheerful face. He had a very ruddy complexion that gave him Santa Claus cheeks, and he was always betting Megs and me that we couldn’t look at him for five minutes without smiling. Neither of us could. Yet he was an unexpected choice to complement my mother’s rather awesome appearance.
‘It isn’t fair, you know,’ I said. ‘As soon as we really get settled somewhere, you guys want to up and leave. And frankly, Dad, I just don’t want to go anywhere right now. I’m a senior this year. I’m going to graduate and I want to do it here where I got some friends. I know kids here.’ I looked at him. ‘What I really want is to go to my senior prom. I want to get asked out by some guy and go on a date and be like every other girl in the senior class. I don’t want to be the only one not invited. The only one who doesn’t have anywhere to go. And if we move now, that’s what’s going to happen.’
He smiled gently and reached a hand over to touch me. ‘I know it’s been hard sometimes,’ he said, and I could tell from his voice that if it came to a showdown between Mama and me over moving, I wouldn’t stand a chance.
I sighed. Then once again, heavily. ‘I feel like I’m going to be a million years old before I even have a date. I feel like I’m probably going to be a toothless old granny, and when I get my first kiss, he’ll suck my dentures right out.’
He grinned.
‘It’s not funny, Dad.’
‘I know, sweetie,’ he said and chortled anyway.
‘Look, if Mama decides to move—’
‘Lesley, she has said absolutely nothing about it. You’re creating problems that don’t exist.’
‘If Mama decides to move, I want to stay with Brianna. I’ve already talked to her. I told her we might be moving, and she said she’d ask her mom to see if I could stay with them until the school year ends. It’d only be until June.’
‘You shouldn’t be talking to people about family matters, Les. This is strictly our personal business. I don’t think you ought to be sharing it with strangers.’
‘Daddy, Brianna’s no stranger. She’s my very best friend. Besides, I wasn’t specific. I was just sounding her out.’
‘The cold bothers your mother,’ he replied flatly. ‘If she wants to move, then I think we ought to move. We owe her that much.’
I said nothing. I put my head down and braced it between my hands. I gazed at the floor. The music coming from the radio was Rachmaninov’s. One of his concertos. I couldn’t remember which one.
‘Dad?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Do you think I’m ugly or anything? I mean, being really honest with me.’
His eyes widened. ‘Of course you’re not ugly, Lesley. What a thing to ask.’
‘I was just wondering.’ I listened to the remainder of the concerto and studied the pattern in the rug.
‘Look,’ he said, and his voice was gentle, ‘you still have plenty of time. Don’t put yourself in a state over it. Things’ll work out just fine.’
I raised my head. ‘How old were you when you first went out with a girl?’
‘Older than you are now. I was in the army.’
‘Didn’t you ever go out before that? When you were at home?’
‘The way your grandmother felt about things like that? Are you kidding? And way out there on the farm?’ He grinned. ‘I was lucky I even knew what girls were.’
‘Oh.’
‘So, see?’ He put his hand on my head, ‘Nature’ll take care of things. Don’t worry. Your time will come.’
Chapter Three
There were no tattered remnants of European aristocracy in my father’s background, no private tutors, no summer afternoons whiled away with garden parties and violin music. The son of an Irish immigrant, my father grew up on a pig farm on the vast plains of Illinois.
There were seven children. My dad was the fourth child, the second son. They weren’t a poor family, not dirt poor the way a lot of farm families were in the Depression. Not the way his father had been when he’d arrived, aged four, in steerage with his parents at Ellis Island. But my dad had recollections of just getting by. My favourite was the one about how he got into a fight at school because another boy had said his coat was a girl’s coat. It had been. His mother had made it over for him from one his sister Kathleen had outgrown. When he was recounting that episode, Dad would always end up grinning. Yes, he’d say, it had been a girl’s coat, but he sure wasn’t going to let Jacky Barnes say so.
The mainstay of their lives had been religion. Both my father’s parents were devout Catholics. All the children had had at least a few years at parochial school, even with the hardship of the Depression. One of his sisters had later joined an order of nuns devoted to helping the poor and still lived in Colombia. His younger brother taught theology at a university in Massachusetts.
When my father was thirteen, his father was killed in a farm accident. He had been mangled under the wreckage of an overturned tractor, and two men near by had helped free him and bring him down to the house. My dad had been alone at the time. He was hoeing in the vegetable garden and keeping an eye on the baby, who was about two. The men had come, carrying his dying father between them. Dad wasn’t one for telling stories. Unlike Mama, he couldn’t spin out a small incident into a captivating drama. But when he told this, you felt it. You saw the skinny kid in worn overalls and dusty bare feet. You saw the baby with his one-eyed teddy bear. Daddy’s mother had gone down to the neighbours’ and so he’d been alone at the house with his small brother and his maimed father and he didn’t know what to do. And every time he told us about it, you felt his horror.
So I never knew my grandfather. We didn’t even have a photograph of him. Once, Dad told us, a travelling photographer had stopped by the farm and offered to take a picture of all of them. His mother made the children wash and dress in their Sunday clothes. But when the photographer returned with the developed pictures, he wanted more money than he had said initially: they hadn’t said there were so many children, the photographer told them. A deal’s a deal, Dad’s father replied. In the end, the photographer was sent packing, photographs and all.
Grandma O’Malley, however, I knew well. When I was very little we’d gone to Illinois every summer to visit her. She lived in a little row house in a northern sector of Chicago not far from Uncle Paddy and Aunt Gretchen’s house, and I remember the cool, damp-smelling attic room where I slept. Later, when I was in grade school, I spent the month of July with her each year.
She was a tiny woman with white hair that she kept in a braided bun and skin stretched so tightly over her bones that her forearms and hands always reminded me of the legs of a bird. Being very much my mother’s daughter in respect of height and bone structure, I was bigger than Grandma O’Malley by the time I was ten.
I always looked forward to those visits when I was in grade school. What I actually loved most, I think, were the journeys to and from Chicago with my father. They were great adventures to me. We always went alone, just him and me, and left Mama at home to take care of Megan. All my Julys were bracketed with memories of Daddy and me sitting way in the back of the bus where my mother refused to sit because it made her carsick, of sharing Cokes and candy bars with him, of making wishes on white horses we saw in roadside pastures. We ate, in steamy, dimly lit bus depot cafés and slept in motels with saggy mattresses and chenille curtains at the windows or dozed in drowsy, diesel-scented darkness.
The visits themselves I anticipated rather less. There were plenty of good aspects, particularly after Megan was born, when I was relieved to discover that I could still go alone and Megan couldn’t come because she was too little for Grandma to take care of. Plus, my cousins lived just down the street from Grandma’s and were a constant source of familiar playmates each summer, which I longed for after our frequent moves. And Grandma was usually willing to spoil me a little. She had small gifts for me when I arrived. She gave me all the pennies from her change each night. Best of all, she would make me buttermilk pancakes for breakfast any morning I asked for them, which was something my mama would never do because she’d never adjusted to the idea of making a whole meal out of something sweet.
There were, however, less enjoyable aspects about going to see Grandma. From the moment I arrived with Daddy I was always aware of a subtle uneasiness, that kind of tension you can detect so readily when you’re young. And it permeated the entire stay. Regardless of the little surprises and treats Grandma had in store for me, the visits always left me anxious and on my guard.
From a very early age I knew what lay at the heart of the matter. Grandma O’Malley was devoutly Catholic and my mother was not only not Catholic but not even what could honestly be called Christian. Consequently, neither my sister nor I had been baptized, confirmed or even taken to church. This left my grandmother aghast.
Of course, Grandma O’Malley did her best to rectify what she considered an unthinkable situation. The moment my father had left, Grandma would call up the priest and have him come over to see me. She bought me Sunday dresses and patent-leather shoes and books of children’s Bible stories. She marched me off to Mass and catechism classes and vacation Bible school. During mealtimes she quizzed me about the life of Jesus. While we were doing the dishes, she would listen to me reciting the Bible verses she’d given me to memorize. And the summer I was nine, she promised to give me five dollars if I would go home and see that Daddy had Megan baptized.
With deadly regularity, my July visits would end with a terrible argument between my father and my grandmother. Dad’s first words to me as he arrived to take me home were invariably about church. Those questions doomed me. If I lied and said I’d had nothing to do with church while I was there, I got into trouble for not telling the truth. If I told the truth, he yelled at Grandma because he had expressly forbidden her to send me to Bible school or catechism classes or whatever and, of course, she always went ahead and did it anyway. Then they’d progress to his telling her that I was his child and if she didn’t like his rules then I wasn’t going to be allowed to come again, and to her telling him that she was not about to have any grandchild of hers burning in Hell. Within moments they’d be arguing about Mama.
Grandma knew Mama’s views on religion. It was impossible not to. If you knew Mama, you knew her views. My mother was fanatically opposed to religion in any form of the word. It was because of the things she had seen in the war, she always said, and because of the way she saw religious people react. She said they knew. She said a lot of people knew – the foreign governments, the people in high places, even a lot of ordinary people. She said they knew of the various kinds of terrible suffering that was tolerated in Germany. And she said they still went home at night and had their suppers and said their prayers and went to bed. They all thought of themselves as good Christians when they were in church on Sunday. They thought they lived in Christian nations. But what kind of teaching was that? Where was the Pope when the Jews were in Auschwitz? Where were the nuns and the priests and the clergymen and all the good, righteous Christians in Congress and the world parliaments, who could have helped, who could have passed laws to let in more refugees, who could have provided more routes of escape or, more importantly, who could have stopped what was happening altogether? Mama always maintained it could have been stopped. If everyone had tried. Together, the Christians, the churches, the Pope, all of them, they could have formed a voice that no leader, not even Hitler, could have ignored. But they hadn’t. Even if it wasn’t conscious, she said, they had chosen not to help. And my mama had no use whatsoever for the doctrines that had allowed so many to turn their backs so easily on all that suffering.
Grandma, for her part, had no use for my mama. I don’t think it was so much Mama’s personal atheism, because I don’t think it mattered a whole lot to Grandma what became of Mama’s eternal soul. Even though she never said so, I always suspected that Grandma felt Hell would probably suit Mama just fine. But what did matter to her was that Mama had taken my father away from the Church. And with him, Megan and me.
Despite my father’s threats about keeping me home, I went back to Grandma’s every July until she died, the year I was thirteen. Almost all I knew about my father’s youth came from those summers.
I think my dad, a quiet and undistinctive boy from the sound of things, might have escaped notice in the rough-and-tumble anonymity of such a large family, if it hadn’t been for his poor health: he had suffered a mild case of polio as an infant and later, scarlet fever, and these had left him with what Grandma called ‘a weakness of the chest’. Consequently, he had been sick a lot, often seriously, and much of his childhood was marked by long periods of isolation and convalescence. Because of these, he’d grown into a shy, introverted boy, not bookish, the way his brother Colin was, but just self-absorbed. Grandma said she’d never been much worried by that. With the casual certainty about destiny that is so common in devoutly religious families, it was assumed my father would become a priest, because he was the second son and that’s what second sons did. So Grandma was comforted by the knowledge that he was not inclined toward fast cars, parties and the high life, the way Paddy, Kip and Mick were.
Of course, my father didn’t become a priest. Nor did he achieve Grandma’s other aspiration for all her sons: a college education. When my dad finished high school, the Second World War had started and like so many other young men of his day, he’d ended up in that. What always went unsaid in these conversations with Grandma but was implied was that Dad had met my mother while he was in Europe. Grandma was capable of attributing virtually anything my father didn’t accomplish to the fact that he had married my mother.
So, my father had joined the army and was posted to England. He was only twenty-one when he married my mother, who was almost two years his senior. After that, he never found the time or the money or the energy to pursue a higher education. And frankly, I don’t think my father ever particularly minded.
What did bother him were the kinds of jobs he ended up with because of his lack of skills. What with moving so often and having no real training, my father had always done whatever he could find, taking dead-end jobs that were easy to get and easy to leave. They never paid enough money, and they usually required physical effort, which made him less employable as he grew older. When we’d moved to Kansas from our previous home in Nebraska, my father had been unemployed for over two months before he found work at Hughson’s Garage. No one was looking for a fifty-year-old unskilled labourer.
I knew he hated his jobs. He never said so but it was one of those things you could feel. He would linger a moment too long over his morning coffee. He would come home with his hands black and his clothes dirty and apologize to Mama even before he kissed her, although Mama never complained. But mainly it was the study. In every house we’d ever lived in my father had always insisted on having an extra room for his study. Even if it meant Megan and I had to share a bedroom. Someday, he told me once, he’d have a job where he’d have to bring home work from the office to do at his desk and he’d need a study – somewhere quiet to get away from the noise of the TV and Megs and me and Mama’s records, so that he could do his paperwork. So far he had never found such a job, but every night after supper he went upstairs and sat for a while behind the desk and waited.
While my father dreamed, my mother acted. We lived like Gypsies because of Mama. She pursued happiness down a real road. Wherever we were, my mother assumed peace of mind must be waiting over the next hill. Nowhere suited her for long. She wanted it cooler; she wanted it warmer. She wanted to be in the country; she wanted to be in town. Always searching, never finding.
There was a regular routine to our moves. First Mama would grow restless, pacing around the house, uprooting things and transplanting them in the garden, paging through Megs’ or my schoolbooks and constructing fabulous tales about what she imagined the places in the pictures must be like, while my sister and I would sit captivated, eating our afternoon snacks at the kitchen table. Then would come the depression. Any little thing my sister or I’d do would upset her, and she’d start having more and more spells. Her anxieties would increase, in particular her fear of leaving the immediate environs of the house and yard, because she’d begin thinking the people in the community didn’t like her any more. Then Dad and I would get stuck with all the grocery shopping and the errands. When those things started happening, I knew it was only a matter of time before we would head off for some new horizon.
I hated the moves. I hated the awful weariness right afterward when I would wake up in the morning and realize that all the people out there were strangers except for Mama, Daddy and Megan. I hated the discouraging task of starting over, of trying to make new friends, of even wanting to try.
My feelings, however, never appeared to make much difference. When my mother was in that state, she had no energy left over for other people’s feelings. As far as my father was concerned, relieving her discomfort was all that seemed to matter; he never questioned the process. If Mama wanted to move, we moved. If Mama thought we’d be happier in Yakima or North Platte or Timbuktu, then that was all it took for my father. He would drop everything, give notice at his job, sell whatever was necessary to raise the money, then pack up and go to wherever it was Mama believed she’d be at peace this time. And he expected the same devotion from Megs and me. We were not allowed even to question the move in front of Mama: this was just something you did when you were part of a family.
Darmowy fragment się skończył.
