Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

“Mother wants hot milk.”

“Have you been up long?”

“All night, off and on,” Mary said. “Didn’t you hear the bell? She wanted water, and then a bedpan, and then another blanket—”

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“Oh, we’re all tired,” said Mary. “You too. And each time I thought it would be the last. It’s not even two o’clock yet. Do you think this will go on all night?”

“Maybe she’s uncomfortable,” Matthew said.

“She’s nervous. She wants someone to talk to. That water she didn’t even drink, and I bet it will be the same with the milk. Oh, I don’t know.” She slumped over the stove, stirring the milk steadily with a silver spoon. “I ended up getting cross with her, and now I feel bad about it,” she said. “There’s too much on my mind. I worry how the children are doing. And Morris, he can barely tie his own shoelaces , and his mother will be feeding him all that starchy food—”

“Go to bed,” said Matthew. “Let me take over.”

“Oh, no, I—”

But she gave up, before she had even finished her sentence, and handed him the spoon and turned to leave. Her terrycloth slippers scuffed across the linoleum, and the grayed end of her bathrobe sash followed her like a tail.

He filled a mug with hot milk and brought it in to his mother, who lay rigid in the circle of light from the reading lamp. “Oh,” she said when she saw him. Since the stroke, she had not spoken his name. She must be afraid that it wouldn’t come out right. She hadn’t said Margaret’s or Andrew’s names, either, and although he could see why — they were all such a mouthful — still he wished she would try. The only one she mentioned was Mary. Was there some significance in that? Was it because Mary was the only one who hadn’t eloped or had a breakdown or refused to give her mother grandchildren?

He propped up a pillow for her and handed her the milk, but after one sip she gave it back to him. “I hear you’re having trouble sleeping,” he said. “Would you like me to read to you?

She shook her head. “When—” she said, and then struggled with her lips. “When you were—”

“When we were children,” Matthew said, knowing how often she began things that way.

She nodded and frowned. “I, I read to—”

“To us,” said Matthew.

She nodded again.

“I remember you did.”

“I never—”

“You never?”

“I never—”

“You never refused?” said Matthew. “You never got tired? You never—”

“No.”

He waited, while she took a deep breath. “I never asked, asked you to—”

“You never asked us to read to you,” said Matthew. But that made so little sense that he was surprised when she seemed satisfied. He turned the sentence over in his mind. “Well, no,” he said finally, “you didn’t.”

“Money, Mary, Mary nooting, knitting—”

“Mary knitting,” said Matthew. “Beside your bed? In the hospital?”

“Gave my life,” his mother said.

“Oh. Saved your life. By calling the police.”

“Gave.”

“Gave your life?”

“Like a mud, a mother,” his mother said. Matthew puzzled over that for a long time. Finally he said, “Are you worried that it’s us taking care of you now?”

She nodded.

“Oh, well, we don’t mind,” he said.

His mother didn’t speak again, but she might as well have. The words locked in her head crossed the night air, crisp and perfectly formed: I do. I mind. But all she did was turn on her side, away from him. Matthew switched off the lamp, unfolded an afghan, and settled himself in an easy chair at the other end of the room. Shortly afterward he heard her deep, even breaths as she fell asleep.

In this sunporch, where the family had always gathered, Mrs. Emerson’s long-ago voice rang and echoed. “Children? I mean it now. Children! Where is your father? When will you be back? I have a right to know your whereabouts, every mother does. Have you finished what I told you? Do you see what you’ve done?” On Timothy’s old oscilloscope, she would have made peaks and valleys while her children were mere ripples, always trying to match up to her, never succeeding. Melissa was a stretch of rick-rack; Andrew’s giggles were tiny sparks that flew across the screen. Margaret only turned the pages of her book and tore the corners off them. She was a low curved line, but Matthew was even lower — the EKG of a dying patient. He pulled the afghan up closer around him. His mother slept on, her moonlit profile sharp and strained, her mouth pulled downward with the effort of accepting when she had always been the one to pour things out.

He slept, and she woke him three times — once for water, once for the sound of his voice, once for a bedpan. For the bedpan she insisted that he call one of the girls. He climbed the stairs in the dark, hesitated at Mary’s door, and then woke Margaret. While she helped her mother he stayed in the living room and kept himself awake by watching a pattern of leaves moving over the Persian rug. Then Margaret came back out and tapped him on the shoulder. “Do you want me to take over?” she asked. “You look dead on your feet.”

“No, I’m all right.”

“I called Emmeline. She won’t come,” Margaret said.

“We’ll find someone.”

“Matthew, you know that I could change Elizabeth’s mind. Mary didn’t put it to her right.”

“No,” Matthew said.

“I could have her here in an hour, if she took a plane.”

“There are agencies all over Baltimore that can help us out with Mother,” Matthew said.

He went back to the easy chair. Its rough fabric had started prickling through his pajamas, and he kept shifting and turning and rearranging the afghan while his mother lay tense and wakeful at the other end of the room. “I want—” she said. But in her pause, while he was waiting for her to finish, Matthew fell asleep.

He awoke at dawn. Every muscle in his body ached. “Oh, Matthew,” someone said, and for a moment he thought it was his mother, finally getting around to saying his name; but it was Margaret. She stood over him, fully dressed, holding Susan. Susan wore a romper suit and straddled her mother’s hip with small round legs still curved like parentheses. She looked down at him solemnly. “Hi there,” he told her. “Matthew, you look terrible,” Margaret said.

“I’m okay.”

He looked over at his mother. She was watching them out of eyes the same as Susan’s — round and pale blue and worried. “How you doing?” Matthew asked her.

“I fool—”

“You feel?”

“I fool I’m—”

She flattened the back of her hand across her mouth. Tears rolled down her stony face, while she stared straight ahead of her. “Mother?” Matthew said. He struggled up out of his chair, but then there was nowhere to go, nothing to say. He and Margaret stood there in silence, already defeated by the day that lay ahead of them.

Everyone agreed that Matthew should go to bed now — even Matthew himself. But first Mary brought him a breakfast tray in the sunporch, and while he was buttering a roll his head grew so heavy that he laid his knife down and leaned back and closed his eyes. He felt the tray being lifted from his knees — a falling sensation, that made him jerk and clutch at air. “You should go upstairs, Matthew,” Mary said. But he only slid lower in his seat and lost track of her voice.

He dreamed that he was in a forest which was very hot and smelled of pine sap. He was walking soundlessly on a floor of brown needles. He came upon someone chopping wood, and he stood watching the arc of the axe and the flying white chips, but he didn’t say anything. Then he felt himself rising out of sleep. He knew where he was: on his mother’s sunporch, swimming in the bright, dusty heat of mid-afternoon. But he still smelled the pine forest. And when he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Elizabeth in a straight-backed chair beside his mother’s bed, whittling on a block of wood and scattering chips like fragments of sunlight across her jeans and onto the floor.