Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

She circled Billy, looked at him and then away again, finally made up her mind to speak. “But!” she said aloud. Her tongue was playing tricks on her. She tried again, making such an effort that her forehead tightened. “But!” she called, and saw Billy dead in his bed, his profile barely denting the pillow. Without taking time to mourn she went on to Richard. Would he help? But Richard was tinkling in the rosebushes. Men! His broad, sloping back reminded her of some sorrow. There was no one left. When she awoke in the night, the bed beside hers glowed white and leaped to her eyes at first glance as if it had something to tell her. So there! it said. She rocked her head from side to side.

Now, that clicking sound. Was it her throat again? Her heart? Her brain? No, only the telephone company, reminding her to hang up. She nearly laughed. Then she grew serious and gathered her thoughts together. It was necessary to call a doctor. She was quite clear about it now. She tensed her neck muscles and raised her head. Far away her feet pointed upward, side by side, ludicrous-looking, the feet of the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz . Her good arm moved to support her. She was just fine; she could do anything. She sank back again and stared up at the table. Beneath it, wooden braces ran diagonally at each corner. They were held in place by screws, which were sunk in round holes so that the heads were flush with the wood. Wasn’t it wonderful how the holes were so round? How the slant of the braces fit so well to the table angles? There was a word for that; she had heard it once.

“Mitering,” Elizabeth said.

Elizabeth, she said silently but briskly, I’m going to want a new backing for that picture at the head of the stairs. Mend the glass in the bookcase. Coil the hose, please. I can’t go getting sued if it trips someone. Do you know how to restring a venetian blind?

Elizabeth’s voice came in on a muffled jumble of sound, like a loudspeaker in a railroad station. She spoke in fragments. “The what?” she said. “What would he do that for?” “Oh, well—” She laughed. “If I have time, maybe,” she said.

We are falling to pieces around here, Mrs. Emerson told her.

Elizabeth laughed. “So are most people,” she said.

Elizabeth, we are—

“All right, all right.”

Mrs. Emerson prepared to sleep, with everything taken care of. Then some irritating thought began drilling her left temple. She had forgotten: she’d stopped liking that girl a long time ago. Shiftless. Untrustworthy. The world was made up of people forever happy, wastefully happy, laughing at something too far away for Mrs. Emerson to see even when she stood on tiptoe. She craned her neck. She clutched at Andrew’s elbow for support. What do you want from me? she asked him.

“Let us in,” he said.

He left. She was all alone. She was back before the children, before her husband, back to the single, narrow-boned girl that had been looking out of her aging body all these years.

“Let us in,” a man said. He rattled the front doorknob. “Mrs. Emerson? Are you there? Can you hear us? Let us in!”

She meant to answer, but forgot. Voices brushed against each other on her front porch. They were wonderful men, just wonderful. They were here for her. Love and trust washed over her in a flood, and she closed her eyes and smiled.

They broke the window of the front door. Now, why would they do such a thing? Large pieces of glass clanged on the floor while she screwed up her face, trying to figure it out. Then she found the answer. She was pleased with the rapid way her mind was working. She turned her head to watch a blue-sleeved arm reach in and unsnap the lock. The door opened and two policemen entered, dressed in full uniform just for her. “Mrs. Emerson?” one said.

“Ham,” she said, and then she went to sleep, finally in the care of someone competent.

Matthew sat by the hospital bed, looking at a Saturday Evening Post while his mother slept. He ran his eyes down a couple of lines, broke off in the middle, and turned the page. He glanced at a few more lines, turned another page. None of what he read was coming through to him. His mind was on his mother, who lay on her back with her hands by her sides. Her face seemed young and unlined. Her eyes moved beneath the veined lids, following dreams. When Matthew was small, coming in to wake her on a Sunday morning, he had watched her in just this way — jealous, back then, of her dreams, which might not be concerned with him at all. Now he hoped that he was farthest from her mind. “Don’t give her anything to worry about,” the doctor had said. “Let her sleep as much as she wants, keep her calm and quiet.” Which made Matthew consider, and reconsider, before he even opened his mouth. The most trivial small talk might lead to something disturbing. When she slept, he was relieved. He willed her into dreams of a long-ago time when she was young and untroubled. He sent her thought-waves of her youth, which for some reason he pictured against a sunlit, windy meadow sprinkled with daisies. “Before you were born …” she used to tell him, and that meadow would rise in front of him, with his mother running through it dressed in white and laughing, free of quarrels and tears and insufficiencies of love.

He glanced across the bed at Mary, who was knitting a child’s sweater. Every time she came to the end of a row she reeled more yarn off the ball with a long, sweeping motion and frowned into space a moment, as if she were trying to remember something. Once she sighed. “You must be tired,” Matthew said. “Why don’t you go on home?”

“Oh, no.”

And then she returned to her knitting. She had spent more time here than Matthew, even — two full days, planted in that armchair. And at night, when he took her home, her mind was still back with her mother. “If only I hadn’t quarreled with her,” she kept saying. “I mean, stated my case, but quietly. Put her off a little instead of coming right out with things. Do you think she blames me?”

“No, of course not.”

But there was no real way of telling. Their mother’s speech was difficult; she could talk, but only after false starts and hesitations. To save effort she kept to the bare essentials. “Water,” she said, and it could have been a polite request or a surly order, no one knew. Yet the doctor said she would be back to normal in no time. Already the paralysis was lifting. Her face merely had a numb look, as if she were under Novocain. Her hand was beginning to respond to massage, and she was anxious to try walking. “Your mother’s a remarkable woman,” the doctor said. Mary frowned, as if he had told her something she didn’t want to hear.

Margaret had come, but she had had to bring the baby. She only visited the hospital when Mary was home to babysit. And Andrew had arrived on the bus the day before, still pale and shocked over the news. “She’s fine, she’s going to be fine,” they told him. But he barely heard. In the hospital room he prowled nervously, stopping every now and then to lay a hand on his mother’s forehead, and finally they had sent him home in a cab. “But I want to be with her,” he kept saying. “Hush, now,” Mary told him, “you’ll only make her worse, going on like this.”

“Can I come back this evening?”

“She’ll be home day after tomorrow, Andrew.”

“Who will stay with her later on? Are you all going to leave her alone again?”

“No, no.”

“I’ll stay. I’ll come here to live, I’ve been meaning to for years.”

“No, Andrew.”

But who would stay with her? It was on all their minds. The girls had to go home soon. Matthew was planning to spend his nights there for a while, but his mother needed someone in the daytime. “Where is Alvareen?” Mary asked. No one had thought to wonder before. They looked at the house, which seemed stale and dusty. Not even Alvareen would have let it get that way. Had she quit? They asked Mrs. Emerson, who merely closed her eyes. “What’s her last name?” Mary said. “Do you have her phone number? We want her to come look after you.”