Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

One of the things he had long ago accepted about Elizabeth was that she didn’t always tell the truth. She seemed to view truth as a quality constantly shifting, continually reshaping itself the way a slant of light might during the course of a day. Her contradictions were tossed off gaily, as if she were laughing at her stories’ habit of altering without help from her. With the police, now, she confined herself to a single version, remodeled only once when they discovered her earlier visit. Yet there were points at which she simply shut up and refused to answer. “You apparently don’t realize that you could be in serious trouble over this,” the policemen said. But that was where they were wrong. She must have realized, to have stopped so short rather than spin whatever haphazard tale came to mind.

“Where did he get the gun?” they asked.

“I don’t know.”

“It just came out of nowhere? What were you two arguing about?” “Arguing?”

“Why were you shouting?”

“Shouting?”

“Miss.”

Elizabeth looked at them, her face expressionless.

“Why did you call home?”

“To say hello.”

“Was that during the earlier visit?”

“Of course.”

“Did the argument arise from that phone call in some way?”

“Argument?”

They gave up. There was no doubt it was a suicide — they had the powder burns, the fingerprints, the statement of his professor providing motivation. Elizabeth was only the last little untied thread, and although they would have liked her to finish wrapping things up they had never thought of her as crucial. They layered death over with extraneous interviews and coroners’ reports and legal processes until Timothy himself was all but forgotten. Then, almost as an afterthought, they declared the case closed. The deceased could be buried, they said. That was the end of it.

“Mother,” Matthew said, “come drink this tea.”

“In a minute.”

She was standing by the window, moving a plant into a pool of sunlight.

“I’ve been talking with Elizabeth,” Matthew told her.

“Oh?”

“She wants to leave her job.”

Mrs. Emerson’s hands dropped from the flowerpot. She straightened her back, so that her sharp shoulderblades suddenly flattened.

“She’s going to wait till after the funeral, though,” he said.

“But leaving! Why? What did she say about me?”

“Well, nothing about you.”

“Did she say I was the cause?” “Of course not.”

“She must have given you a reason, though.”

“No. Not really,” Matthew said.

His mother turned. Her eyes, when she was disturbed, never could rest on one place; they darted back and forth, as if she were hoping to read her surroundings like a letter. “And why tell you?” she said. “I am her employer.”

“I guess she thought it was a bad time to bother you.”

“No, she blames me for something. But now! To leave now! Why, I’ve been thinking of her as one of the family. I took her right in.”

“Maybe you could talk to her,” Matthew said.

“Oh, no. I couldn’t.”

“If she knew how you felt about it—”

“If she wants to leave, let her go,” said his mother. “I’m not going to beg her to stay.”

Then she settled herself in a flowered armchair, arranging her skirt beneath her, and pushed her bracelet back on her wrist and leaned forward with perfect posture to pour herself a cup of tea.

Matthew went downstairs and into the kitchen, where he found Peter eating the sandwich that had been on the drainboard. “Oh, sorry,” Peter said. “Was this yours?”

“I didn’t want it.”

“Just got to needing a little snack,” Peter said. He gulped down one more bite and then set the rest of the sandwich aside, as if he felt embarrassed at being hungry. He was forever embarrassed by something, or maybe that was just his age — nineteen, still unformed-looking, clomping around in enormous loafers bumping into people and saying the wrong things. He had come at the tail end of the family, five years after Melissa. The others had no more than a year between them and some of them less; they were a bustling foreign tribe, disappearing and reappearing without explanation, while Peter sat on the floor beside his rubber blocks and watched with surprised, considering eyes. Then the oldest ones were given quarters on the third floor, into which they vanished for all of their last years at home. They read in bed undisturbed, visited back and forth in the dead of night, formed pacts against the grownups. Peter stayed in the nursery, next door to his parents. No one ever thought to change the pink-and-yellow wallpaper. He grew up while their backs were turned, completely on his own, long after the third floor was emptied and echoing. Now when he came home on visits he bumped into doors and failed to listen when he was spoken to, as if he had given up all attempts at belonging here.

“Mother’s upset because Elizabeth is leaving,” Matthew said, trying to draw him into the family.

“Gee, that’s too bad. Who’s Elizabeth?” “Elizabeth . The handyman.”

“Oh. I guess she must think we’re a bunch of kooks after all that’s happened.”

“No, she—”

“Is that Elizabeth? I thought her name was Alvareen.”

“No — what? Whose name? Oh, never mind.”

Matthew left, bypassing the living room. He was tired of talk. He went out through the sunporch, a quiet place lit with diagonals of dusty orange light. Alvareen stood ironing a table cloth while tears rolled down her cheeks. (She had shown up two days in a row, on time, impressed by tragedy.) Margaret was curled on the windowseat reading a book and chewing on tight little cylinders that she had made from the page corners. Neither of them looked up as he passed.

“Elizabeth,” he said, standing under the poplar tree.

“Here I am.”

She sat on a branch above the one she had just cut off, leaning sideways against the trunk.

“Shall I help you down?”

“I like it here.”

“I’m going home now. I’m not coming back until the funeral.”

“Oh. All right.”

“Could you come down? I’d like to talk some things over with you.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, would you rather I stayed here? What do you want to do?”

“I want to sit in this poplar tree,” Elizabeth said.

He nodded, and stood around for a while with his hands in his pockets. Then he left.

Matthew’s house was out in the country, part of a rundown old farm that his father had somehow come into possession of. His family called it a shack, but it was more than that. It was a tiny two-story house, the front a peeling white, the other three sides unpainted and as gray as the rick-rack fence that separated it from the woods behind. To get there he had to leave the highway and drive down a rutted road that rattled the bones of his old car. At the end of the road he parked and walked through new, leafy woods up to the front yard, which was a floor of packed earth. A rotting tire hung from an apple tree. A Studebaker rusted on concrete blocks out back. His mother had come here only once and, “Oh, Matthew,” she had said, looking at the porch with its buckling slat railings, “I can’t go in there. It would make me too sad.” But she had, of course. She had perched uneasily on a squat rocking chair and accepted Oreos and lemonade. Her hair and the glass lemonade pitcher had been two discs of gold beneath the high smoked ceilings. Then forever after that she begged him to find some place nicer. “I’ll pay for it myself, don’t think about the money,” she said. “I’ll fix it up for you. I’ll shop for what it needs.” When he refused she settled for buying what she called “touches”—an Indian rug, homespun curtains, cushions from Peru. She comforted herself by imagining that the house was meant to be Bohemian, one of those places with pottery on the windowsills and serapes draped over the chairs. Matthew didn’t mind. He had chosen to live here because it was comfortable and made no demands on him, and all the cushions in Peru couldn’t change that. His father had been happy to give his permission. (He liked to see every last thing put to use.) Then at his death he had willed Matthew the house outright. The others got money; Matthew got the house, which was what he really wanted.