Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“Agatha, will you drop it? He doesn’t want to be around for this.”

“Well. Sorry,” Agatha said stiffly.

They went back upstairs to their grandparents’ bedroom, and while Thomas bore the jewelry box off to the pantry Daphne and Agatha started on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. They had assumed this part would be easy — just sweaters, surely — but underneath lay stacks of moldering photo albums Daphne had never seen before. “Oh, those,” Agatha said. “They used to be downstairs in the desk.” She picked up a manila envelope and peered inside. Daphne, meanwhile, flipped through the topmost album and found rows of streaky, pale rectangles showing ghostlike human faces with no features but pinhead eyes. “Polaroid, in its earliest days,” Agatha explained.

“Well, darn,” Daphne said, because the captions were so alluring. Danny at Bethany Beach, 1963. Lucy with the Crains, 8/65 . Her father, whom she knew only from a boringly boyish sports photo hanging in the living room. Her mother, who was nothing but the curve of a cheek above Daphne’s own newborn self on page one of her otherwise empty baby book.

She turned to the albums below. The pictures there were more distinct, but they documented less interesting times. Claudia, thinner and darker, married a plucked-looking Macy in a ridiculous white tuxedo. Doug stood at a lectern holding up a plaque. Claudia and Macy had a baby. Then they had another. People seemed to graduate a lot. Some wore long white robes and mortarboards, some wore black and carried their mortarboards under their arms, and one, labeled Cousin Louise , wore just a dress but you could see this was a graduation because of her ribboned diploma and her relatives pressing around. All those relatives attending all those ceremonies, sitting patiently through all those tedious speeches just so they could raise a cheer at the single mention of a loved one’s name. It wasn’t fair: by the time of Daphne’s own graduation, most of those people had vanished and Claudia and Macy had moved out of state. The family had congealed into smaller knots, wider apart, like soured milk. Their gatherings were puny, their cheers self-conscious and faint.

“Thomas and me with Mama,” Agatha said, thrusting a color snapshot at Daphne. “I wonder how that got here.”

She had pulled it from the manila envelope: a slick, bright square that Daphne took hold of reverently. So. Her mother. A very young woman with two small children, standing in front of a trailer. Probably she and Daphne looked alike — same shade of hair, same shape of face — but this woman seemed so long ago, Daphne couldn’t feel related to her. Her dress was too short, her makeup too harsh, her surroundings too tinny and garish. Had she ever cried herself to sleep at night? Laughed till her legs could no longer support her? Fallen into such a rage that she’d pounded the wall with her fists?

Daphne used to ask about her mother all the time, in the old days. She had plagued her sister and brother with questions. They never gave very satisfactory answers, though. Agatha said, “Her hair was black. Her eyes were, I don’t know, blue or gray or something.” Thomas said, “She was nice. You’d have liked her!” in his brightest tone of voice. But when Daphne asked, “What would I have liked about her?” he just said, “Oh, everything!” and looked away from her. He could be so exasperating, at times. At times she imagined him encased in something plastic, something slick and smooth as a raincoat.

Agatha held out her hand for the snapshot, and Daphne said, “I think I’ll keep it.”

“Keep it?”

“I’ll get it framed.”

“What for?” Agatha asked, surprised.

“I’m going to hang it in the living room with the other family pictures.”

“In the living room! Well, that’s just inappropriate,” Agatha told her.

Daphne had a special allergy to the word “inappropriate.” A number of teachers had used it during her schooldays. She said, “Don’t tell me what’s appropriate!”

“What are you so prickly about? I only meant—”

“She has just as much right to be on that wall as Great-Aunt Bess with her Hula Hoop.”

“Yes, of course she does,” Agatha said. “Fine! Go ahead.” And she passed Daphne the manila envelope. “Here’s all the rest of her things.”

Daphne shook the envelope into her lap. Certificates. Receipts. A date on one read 2/7/66. She didn’t see any more photos. “Put them away; don’t leave them lying around,” Agatha said, delving into the chest again. Her voice came back muffled. “We’re trying to get organized, remember.”

So Daphne took them across the hall to her room. It used to be Thomas’s room, and although Thomas had to sleep on the couch now he kept his belongings here during his visits. His toilet articles littered Daphne’s bureau and his leather bag spilled clothing onto her floor. Daphne suddenly felt overcome by objects . What did she need with these papers, anyhow? Except for the snapshot, they were worthless. And yet she couldn’t bear to throw them away.

When she returned to her grandparents’ bedroom, she found Agatha looking equally defeated. She was standing in front of Bee’s closet, facing a row of heart-breakingly familiar dresses and blouses. Crammed on the shelf overhead were suitcases and hatboxes and a sliding heap of linens — the linens moved last spring from beneath the leaky roof. It showed what this household had descended to that they’d never been moved back, except for those few items in regular use. “What are these?” Agatha asked, taking a pinch of a monogrammed guest towel.

“I guess we ought to carry them to the linen closet,” Daphne said.

But the linen closet, they discovered, had magically replenished itself. The emptied top shelf now held Doug’s shoe-polishing gear and someone’s greasy coveralls and the everyday towels not folded but hastily wadded. And the lower shelves, which hadn’t been sorted in years, made Agatha say, “Good grief.” She gave a listless tug to a crib sheet patterned with ducklings. (How long since they’d needed a crib sheet?) When they heard Thomas on the stairs, she called, “Tom, could you bring up more boxes from the basement?”

She pulled out half a pack of disposable diapers — the old-fashioned kind as stiff and crackly as those paper quilts that line chocolate boxes. From the depths of the closet she drew a baby-sized pillow and said, “Ick,” for a rank, moldy smell unfurled from it almost visibly. The leak must have traveled farther than they had suspected. “Throw it out,” she told Daphne. Daphne took it between thumb and forefinger and dropped it on top of the diapers. Next Agatha brought forth a bedpan with an inch of rusty water in the bottom—“That too,” she said — and a damp, cloth-covered box patterned with faded pink roses. “Is this Grandma’s?” she asked. “I don’t remember this.”

Both of them hovered over it hopefully as she set the box on the floor and lifted the lid, but it was only a sewing box, abandoned so long ago that a waterlogged packet of clothing labels inside bore Claudia’s maiden name. There were sodden cards of bias tape and ripply, stretched-out elastic; and underneath those, various rusty implements — scissors, a seam ripper, a leather punch — and tiny cardboard boxes falling apart with moisture. Clearly nothing here was of interest, so why did they insist on opening each box? Even Agatha, common-sense Agatha, pried off a disintegrating cardboard lid to stare down at a collection of shirt buttons. Everything swam in brown water. Everything had the dead brown stink of overcooked broccoli. It was amazing how thorough the rust was. It threaded the hooks and eyes, it stippled the needles and straight pins. It choked the revolving wheel of the leather punch and clogged each and every one of its hollow, cylindrical teeth.