After the Gala

After the Gala

This isn’t so bad: that was my last thought before falling asleep. I had many reasons not to accept this award. I’m not a public speaker, I’m embarrassed by my corded face, and, above all, the museum was a four-hour bus-ride from New York. (Driving, of course, wasn’t an option.) But the young man who met me at the station had lovely green eyes, and the museum staff had booked me a charming room in a Victorian bed-and-breakfast just outside of Burlington – a back room, away from the sound of traffic. The proprietor, aloof in the way only New Englanders can get away with, was a crusty woman with clipped gray hair. When I declined the leaf-peeping brochure she tried to press into my hand, she looked offended, as if she herself had hand-painted the scarlet and goldenrod leaves and laid them out on the ground. I almost told her that I hated autumn, that autumn heralded winter and winter was the season of death, but thought better of it. I’m sure she already thought I was a curmudgeon – I am, after all, a skinny and pinched old woman – and I didn’t want to alienate her further.

The bed was surprisingly comfortable, and as I was trying to decide whether to set my alarm for breakfast (blueberry muffins, I suspected, and excellent coffee that she wouldn’t refill unless you asked) or sleep in – that’s when the door opened and they started filing in. First came my younger brother, Andrew, whom I hadn’t seen since I was twelve, when he drowned in a boating accident at camp. Then Jack, my first husband, Jack of the dark lashes and even, shark-like teeth, Jack who longed to be back in high school sneaking cigarettes with his buddies; then my second husband, my beloved Tommy who left me ten years ago in a prolonged, agonizing death; then my gentle, anxious father; and finally, holding up the rear, ushering everyone else in like a border collie, my mother, smelling of laundry detergent and White Shoulders and potting soil.

When she shut the door behind her my heart fell, and the current of longing that pulsated through my body must have reached my face because everyone was looking at me with pity, and I turned to Tommy and saw that he was thinking exactly what I was thinking: that the most beloved person of all, the person whose absence darkened the room and weighed it down, the person who briefly filled our hearts with light and laughter, oh, that crystal tinkling laugh of hers, the person who would have softened me, would have made me a kinder and warmer woman, wasn’t coming.

But this was no time to wallow. I smiled my hostess smile and invited them to sit down. There was only one chair in the room and, by unspoken agreement, it was given to my mother because she and I were the only ones in the room who had experienced the singular tragedy of losing a child and, therefore, deserved every compensation. The others lowered themselves onto the floor, with a combination of effort and cautiousness. After all, my parents and two husbands were old; the only one who slid to the floor without clutching a body part was ten-year-old Andrew. Then, somewhere outside, an invisible conductor raised his invisible baton and the music began.

It was great fun listening to the soundtrack of my life waft through my window: The Lindy, The Girl from Ipanema, Fly Me to the Moon, Afternoon of a Faun, all six of Bach’s cello suites performed by Pablo Casals. Then I heard the opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth. I was taken aback – I expected his more elegant Ninth – and when the music abruptly stopped, leaving those four calamitous tones dangling in the air, I understood that the show I’d been enjoying so much as a spectator was going to be participatory. I wasn’t going to be let off the hook after all. This wasn’t a party; it was a reckoning.

I watched as my mother dipped back into her purse – the black, bottomless faux-alligator purse with the gold clasp that I remembered from my childhood – and pulled out an assortment of items, one after another. The Phi Beta Kappa pin from my Vassar days, the boarding pass from my first flight to Paris (I remember pasting it into my scrapbook, right next to the menu from Le Procope), a simple engagement ring, a Moroccan dagger inlaid with mother of pearl, a piece of driftwood, a small yellow sock, and finally, a gavel.

So I was going to be put on trial. Judged and sentenced. It was a horrifying prospect, but tinged with relief, too, with a sense of – not closure, my guilt is as amorphous and enormous as a nuclear cloud, and amnesty of any sort is more than I expect, or deserve – but elementalism. Of stripping away all the layers so the world could see who I was and what I had done, as if I’d been wearing a heavy cape for most of my life and was about to feel cold for the first time. I shivered in anticipation and pulled the quilt around my shoulders.

Tommy stood up and shuffled over to me. “You know,” he said. “Nobody blames you.” I did know. Everyone said those three words to me, at the time and ever since. They meant nothing then, and they mean nothing now.

“Can I see the sock?” My mother passed it to me. I have few memories of the immediate aftermath of the accident – the first three months remain a blur – but I vividly remember her asking me for the sock. We were standing in the driveway, looking back and forth between the five-foot-tall snowbanks that had blocked my view when I was backing out and the blood that snaked through the driveway like a spilled can of paint. The EMTs had just loaded Lily’s body onto the ambulance, only of course it wasn’t my Lily, not really, just a wrapped sapling or a bundle of laundry. I hadn’t yet entered the haze of pain; all I felt was a crush of weight on my chest, as if it had been me and not my three-year-old who’d been run over by a two-and-a-half-ton station wagon. As we watched the ambulance pull away, my mother asked if she could have one of Lily’s socks.

It was such an unexpected question, I almost laughed. Maybe it was the fact that she was asking for my permission, as if I were in a position to deny anybody anything ever again. As if one sock less made any difference. I remember thinking that I would have liked to give her everything: all of Lily’s outgrown baby’s clothes, the onesie they gave her in the hospital, the plush Snoopy she’d gotten from my best friend, the taffeta dress she’d worn to my parents’ fortieth anniversary party. But she wanted only the one sock, which she’d carried in her purse all these years. It weighed more than the gavel and driftwood and dagger combined.

My mother picked up the gavel, turned it around in her hands, looked at it from every angle. “I don’t want to do this,” she said, raising it high above her head, as if she was going to cleave a log with an axe. Just as she was about to bring it down, there was another knock on the door.

Tommy and I looked at each other. My mother, relieved, dropped the gavel onto the carpeted floor and reached for the sock. I knew it. I knew she’d come, with her jasper eyes, her one yellow sock, her laugh like the inside of a glass bell.

“I’ll get it,” Andrew said, and he jumped up like the young boy he was and opened the door and there she stood, my Lily of the Valley, wearing a white t-shirt printed with violets and denim overalls. I opened my arms and she tumbled into them. Tommy came over and took her small hand. She looked at him, her eyes big and dark as the sky. Then she laughed.

And the sun came out. I know it couldn’t have happened, and I also know it did. The room was suffused with warm rose-gold light. Our faces that had looked sallow under the fluorescent bulbs overhead turned luminous. We looked at each other, wide-eyed and delighted. Soon we were all laughing along with Lily, clutching our bellies, tears rolling down our cheeks.

Tommy was the first to recover. “Hey, Pumpkin,” he said, raising Lily’s fingers to his lips. “Hey there.” Then we were silent for a long time, me with my cheek pressed against hers, Tommy with his big, meaty fingers interlaced with her tapered ones.

“How did you get here, Lily?” I asked.

“I was wondering the same thing.” The voice came from the doorway. It was the woman from the B and B, the one who’d been so offended by my blasé dismissal of New England foliage. “I heard her pounding on the door,” she said. “I almost called the police, but then I looked through the peephole and saw that she was just a slip of a thing. She asked for you.”

My mother stood up, straightened her skirt, and reached for the girl. The laughter was gone from her eyes. “Come along,” she said, her tone more pragmatic than impatient. “It’s time we got back.”

“But she just got here!” I felt the tears rising behind my eyes. “How can you take her so soon?”

“I’m sorry, dear, we have to go,” she said. “You know we can’t stay here forever.” My father, Tommy, Jack, and Andrew stood up and turned toward the door.

“Don’t go!” I was sobbing. “Please, can’t you stay? I can’t do this again. I’ll die if you take her away from me.”

“Hush,” she said. “Nobody’s taking her away from you. Now let’s find your coat. There’s a nip in the air.” She opened the closet door, took out my black wool coat, and handed it to me. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out her wallet. She handed the woman a few bills and a business card.

The gray-haired woman looked at the card and nodded to my mother before tucking it into the pocket of her bathrobe. She reached out to shake my hand. Her grip was surprisingly soft, and she held on for a long time.

“I wish you well,” she said.

Lily jumped off my lap and walked toward the door. “Swing me!” she said. And with Tommy holding her right hand and me holding her left, we counted: “One… two… three… swing!” Then we swung her high and, together, crossed the threshold.